by N. P. Martin
As for the manner in which the victim was killed, I could see no motive for it other than killing for twisted pleasure. The poor woman’s head had almost been severed. And why use magic to display the body in such a grim manner? What was the killer trying to say?
I walked slowly around the bed once more, aware that Murtagh would probably tear me a new one for contaminating the crime scene, but I couldn’t help it. Some grim fascination was goading me on as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
When my gaze fell upon the woman’s swollen belly, I frowned as I stared at it, for the bump there now seemed bigger. Not by much, but enough to give me cause to think that it had grown since I last looked at it. Shaking my head, I decided I was imagining things and turned to leave the room.
But as I turned around, I cried out in surprise when I saw someone standing there in the doorway, and then breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it was just Zee. She was standing there in nothing but a black T-shirt as she stared up at the suspended body above the bed and all the blood floating around it.
“Was last night not enough for you?” she said, her face serious. “You had to come up here and do this to get your kicks?”
“What? No, I didn’t—”
A smile spread across Zee’s face. “Relax, Dee. I know you didn’t do this. It would have been cool if you did, though.”
“No, it wouldn’t have. Don’t be sick.”
“I was just kidding.”
“No you weren’t. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I woke up, and you were gone. So I tracked you here. The cat is sitting outside, by the way.”
“I know. It’s too afraid to come in.”
“You think the cat saw what happened?”
I hadn’t thought of that yet, but thinking about it, it was possible the cat saw everything. With the right spell, I could probably search the cat’s mind and possibly get an ID on the killer. “I don’t know. I could probably run a spell on it, though.”
Zee shook her head and smiled to herself as she stared at the near decapitated body. “This is some piece of work. As a demon, I can’t help but be impressed.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“You think this is the work of a serial killer?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe. If it is, it’s their first victim.”
“That you know of.”
“I’ve looked into every murder that’s happened in this city for the last decade or more, and I’ve never come across anything like this.”
“You’re excited by it, aren’t you?” she said, moving toward me. “How about I suck your cock right now? You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Admit it.”
“Stop fucking with me, Zee. I’m trying to gather information here before the cops get involved.”
She smiled and shook her head slightly. “How can I help?”
I turned to face the body again. “Tell me your impressions.”
“Hmm,” Zee said as she walked toward the body, drinking in the scene’s horror, her deep-set eyes almost lit up by it. “I don’t see any genuine pleasure in this act, although whoever killed this woman fucked her beforehand. I can still smell the sex in the room.” She walked up close to the body and stared up at the head. “One death stroke. Done quick, and with significant power. The blow almost took her head off.” She walked around a little more, her gaze falling on the victim’s belly. “Interesting.”
“What is?” I asked, knowing what she was going to say.
“This woman is pregnant.”
“Was, you mean.”
Zee looked at me and shook her head. “Not was. Is.”
“What?” I said, frowning as I went and stood beside her. “What are you saying, Zee?”
“I’m saying something is growing inside this woman’s womb. I can sense something in there.”
“But…that’s impossible. She’s dead. How can something still be growing? And what is it? You’re saying whatever’s inside her is not human?”
Reaching up, Zee placed her hand on the side of the victim’s abdomen. “It can’t be human if it’s still growing. I can feel it moving inside her.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Are you sure?”
Zee nodded. “Yes. There’s something in there, and it isn’t human.”
“Then…what is it?”
Zee took her hand off the woman’s side and looked at me. “Whatever it is, I don’t think you’ll have to wait long to see it.”
“You think it, whatever it is, is growing that fast?”
“Look at the woman’s belly,” she said. “It’s gotten bigger since I walked in here.”
I stood back and looked up at the suspended woman and nearly gasped, seeing Zee was right. “Jesus. Her body is being used as an incubator.” I paused for a second. “But if that’s the case, wouldn’t she still have to be alive?”
“Clearly not,” Zee said. “Some things feed on dead tissue.”
“Like what?”
“Death Spawn.”
“Death Spawn?”
“A form of demon,” she said. “A type of incubus created by Asmodeus. A nasty breed who spill their seed into their living human victim before killing them. The seed is then left to develop inside the dead human body.”
“And what does this seed turn into?”
“A monster whose sole aim is to suck out a person’s soul, sending that soul straight to Hell,” Zee said a little too casually. “They eat their victim’s body once they are done.”
“Jesus. That’s messed up.”
Zee nodded. “It’s no worse than what I do.”
“You don’t eat your victims, Zee.”
“Not always.”
“Funny.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
I shook my head at her. “So you think the spawn of an incubus is inside the victim?”
“Only one way to find out,” she said. “How about I go downstairs and grab some popcorn? Then we can settle down and watch the show.”
I stared at her. “You’re serious.”
“Yes. I’m dying to see what’s in there now. Aren’t you?”
Before I could answer, whatever was growing inside the woman’s body must’ve kicked, for the woman’s belly distended slightly and her body jerked.
“It must’ve heard us,” Zee said, smiling like there wasn’t a monster inside the dead woman’s belly. “Come out little one, so we can see you.”
“Would you stop,” I told her as I stood wondering what to do. I no longer thought calling the cops was a good idea, especially since there was a monster apparently about to be born. “I think we should kill this thing before it can be…born, if that’s the right word.”
“You do that,” Zee said. “Then you won’t know what you’re dealing with here. I assume you want to track whatever did this.”
I nodded. “Of course. But even if we kill the thing, we should still be able to tell what it is, right?”
“Probably.”
“So we kill it then.”
“How?”
“I guess we could stab it. Unless you want to do the honors with your claws.”
Zee held up one hand as her long fingernails extended into three-inch claws that were as hard as steel. “These will get the job done, and you won’t have to get your hands bloody.”
“Yeah. I got enough blood on me last night.”
Jesus. I couldn’t believe we were going to eviscerate the poor woman’s corpse. As if she hadn’t been put through enough degradation. Still, if she were alive, she would’ve no doubt wanted that thing out of her. “Okay then. Do it.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “How are you going to explain things to the cops?”
“I’m sure Murtagh will understand. He can concoct whatever story he wants for his report.”
“You know he doesn’t like you interfering.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “I’m not about to let that thing be born into the world so it can
inflict god knows what damage on innocent people, not to mention us. Who knows what abilities it might have?”
Zee nodded. “You are right. If it’s what I think it is—the spawn of an incubus—it won’t be easy to kill once it gets out, even for me. And then it will kill others and grow at a rapid rate, eventually impregnating some other human to start the entire cycle over again.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a step back from the dead woman. “Kill it then.”
“Let me see if I can pull the body down a bit,” she said, reaching up, grabbing one of the dead woman’s arms and pulling. As Zee pulled, the corpse came down a little, moving slowly as though it was sinking in a thick, viscous fluid.
“Why keep the body suspended like that, anyway?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Zee said, having pulled the dead woman down level with her chest. “To keep it away from anything that might want to eat it, perhaps? Like rats, I dunno.”
“So it’s all about protecting the spawn?”
“Probably.” Zee held her hand over the dead woman’s belly, which had swollen even more in the last few minutes. Despite the horror of the situation, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the life-form’s rapid growth, and be curious about what it looked like. That’s the thing with all this supernatural stuff. As horrifying as it all is most of the time, it was still endlessly fascinating, especially to an enquiring mind like mine.
“Ready?” Zee said as she pressed her black claws against the dead woman’s skin, a slight smile on her face.
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” I said. “Do it.”
The second Zee’s claws penetrated the dead woman’s flesh, a tiny black-clawed hand burst out of the woman’s belly, causing both me and Zee to cry out in surprise as thick, coagulated blood splattered everywhere, spraying Zee’s face.
“Shit!” I exclaimed. “It must know we’re trying to kill it!”
Despite the appearance of the hand, Zee pushed her own hand deeper into the dead woman’s belly, just as something small and round pushed against the victims belly from the inside, stretching the skin so much you could make out the features of the little bastard’s face.
“It’s stabbing my hand with its claws!” Zee said.
“Grab its head!” I told her. “Crush it!”
Zee used her other hand to grab the spawn’s head just as it split the skin of the woman’s belly, the skin peeling back over its head to reveal the full extent of its monstrous little face. Before Zee grabbed the spawn’s head, I had time to be shocked at how human it looked, apart from the blazing red eyes and the fully formed needle-like teeth in its oversized mouth. And speaking of teeth, the emerging spawn sank them into Zee’s hand before she could grab the little bastard’s head, causing Zee to cry out in pain as the baby monster severed her finger, which fell to the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” I said. “It bit your finger off!”
“I can see that!” Zee said.
After the baby incubus bit Zee’s finger, it disappeared inside its dead mother, vanishing from sight.
“Grab it!” I shouted at Zee.
“I can’t!” Zee said, retracting her hand from inside the dead woman and standing back. “It has crawled up into its mother’s chest!”
“What’s it doing?” I asked, my heart pounding with adrenaline.
“Hiding, probably.” Zee stood examining her hand, which was down a finger, seemingly unconcerned about the baby hell spawn now. “It will take me days to grow a new finger.”
“That’s it?” I asked her. “You’re not going to try and get that thing outta there?”
“You try,” she said. “I’m done.”
“Seriously? Zee—”
Before I could even finish the sentence, there was a loud ripping sound, followed by a gush of blood from the dead woman’s back, and a terrible stench of blood and guts. A second later, the baby incubus fell out from its mother’s back and landed on the floor, splashing into the blood. Instinctively, I cried out and jumped back as the spawn immediately got to its feet and bared its teeth at me.
“Grab it!” I shouted at Zee.
Zee reached down to grab the newly emerged spawn, but before she could get her claws into it, the baby shot away from us, turning and running up and over the bed with jaw-dropping speed. “Christ, that thing is fast,” Zee said.
From the other side of the bed, the incubus spawn made a high-pitched screaming noise and then bolted out of the bedroom before we even knew what was happening. It’s clawed feet clicked rapidly off the wood floors as it sped into the hallway and then turned and bolted for the front door. As I ran out of the room to go after it, I was just in time to see the creature pick up the poor cat, who had been waiting outside still, and bite the feline in half. “No!” I shouted.
With a piece of the cat in each of its small hands, the incubus spawn turned and glared at me with its blazing red eyes, and I swear, the little bastard smiled at me as it tossed away the pieces of the cat and then bolted down the hallway toward the stairs. By the time I ran down the hall and looked around the doorway, the spawn had gone, leaving a trail of blood behind it.
Shaking my head, I turned around to see Zee come out of the bedroom, her face covered in blood. “That could’ve gone better,” she said.
I shook my head and sighed. “Shit.”
5
Ignorance is bliss. So they say anyway. I prefer to think of it as ignorance is ignorance, and I don’t like being ignorant of anything. Living in the dark is not for me. Growing up, I too much of my time living in the dark. Even after my mother died under mysterious circumstances, I remained in the dark about the true nature of her death. Maybe I did so out of fear—a fear of the truth. A fear that things would change too much, even though they had changed too much already when my mother died. Suddenly she was gone, and there was just me and my sister left. And my father as well, of course, but he became even more detached from us than he was when my mother was alive. Sometimes it felt like he blamed us for her death. I found out later that he didn’t, for in fact, he was to blame for our mother’s death. It took me years to find that out, for I was still a child when my mother died. When I found out the truth, there was no turning back. I fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t emerged from it since. Ava, though, she remained firmly above ground. I saw to that. Hypocritically, you might say. For there was me, all bastion of truth and light, and I kept my sister in the dark about certain facts. About our mother’s death for one. About the existence of certain things. Dark things. Evil things. She didn’t need to know, or so I thought all those years I kept her in the dark. I was doing her a favor, I told myself. The truth may have tainted me, but it didn’t have to sully her as well. She could still have a normal life.
And she did. Until she got to Harvard. Her first year there, that’s when she disappeared. After years of searching for her, I had come up with few leads. But the few leads I had all pointed to the Occult Underground. She had got herself mixed up in something. Her ignorance of the darkness out there had blinded her to the danger she’d walked into. Ignorance that I had gone to great lengths to instill in her. For that reason, I’m as much to blame for her sudden disappearance—and let’s be realistic here—her likely death. I never let myself believe she was dead, of course, but in the back of my mind, that nagging voice still existed:
You’re wasting your time. She’s gone forever. You’ll never find her, and if you do, it will be the rotten remains of her corpse.
“Do you think I was meant to find that cat?” I asked Zee as I stood in the dead woman’s apartment—whose name I still didn’t know—desperately craving a cigarette.
“What?” Zee said, staring at her hand as blood poured from the stump where her right index finger used to be. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It just seems funny that the cat should’ve been sitting there in the middle of the road like that. If I didn’t know better, I would say someone put a spell on it.”
�
�On the cat? Are you crazy?”
“It can be done.”
“So someone put a spell on a cat to what, sit in the middle of the road until you came along? And then when you did come along, the cat was programmed to lead you up to this apartment?” She shook her head at me. “Do you even know how paranoid you’re sounding right now?”
“The world I live in, I can afford to be paranoid. Shit, I can’t afford not to be paranoid.”
“You’re saying this is all part of some conspiracy?” she all but scoffed.
“There’s always somebody out to get you. Me more than most. I know ten different people who could easily have done this.”
“Who could’ve gotten an incubus—a rare breed of incubus—to kill that woman in there?”
“Seems a bit coincidental it happened two floors up from my apartment.”
“Our apartment. And that’s probably all it is. A coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence. You know that better than anyone.”
Zee shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re talking about this shit when I’m standing here with a missing finger, bleeding all over the damn floor.”
“How is it?” I asked her. “I’m sure you’ve had worse.”
“Did you mean to be a bastard? Because that’s how you sound, like a bastard.”
“Sorry, I’m just—”
“You’re pissed off because the cat got killed, and now you have no chance of identifying the killer.”
She knew me so well.
“There’s a story here, and I’m going to find it.”
